A fully integrated, year-round curriculum reflecting the mutual histories of the American people was what Black History Month’s founder, Carter G. Woodson, had in mind when he began articulating the counter-narrative to Jim Crow in the early 20th century.

Every African-American historian is, in a sense, a descendant of Woodson, and though many may question the relevancy of Black History Month today, I believe strongly that for all its potential misuses, we should continue to embrace it as an opportunity to lobby school leaders for the kind of curriculum reform to which he pointed us, but did not achieve, in his lifetime.

According to the website of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), Woodson’s legacy organization, the spark for Black History Month was lit by the emancipation. In the United States, 1915 marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Taking the lead was Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s home state, his final resting place and the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment in February 1865. Fifty years on, Illinois had also become a main destination for waves of black workers leaving the South for better paying jobs in what we now call “the Great Migration.” Binding them together was a hunger for looking back at the odds they had defied.

The focal point of the effort was the Lincoln Jubilee and National Half-Century Anniversary Exposition of Negro Freedom, launched in Chicago as a mini-Smithsonian Institute. Measuring African-Americans’ progress since the Civil War, the massive historical exhibition was housed at the famous Chicago Coliseum between August and September 1915.

According to a recap in the Chicago Defender on Sept. 18 of that year, 100,000 visitors took the tour, with 20,000 attending a celebration there led by the city’s popular white mayor, William Thompson. “If the three hundred years’ experience of this people in this country don’t entitle them to one public holiday,” Thompson wrote in his remarks, “then let us abolish public holidays as foolish and meaningless because this particular one celebrates the emancipation of four million human beings from bondage.” Political pandering? There was some of that. But implicitly Thompson was also making a case for setting aside the anniversary of emancipation as American’s secular analogue to the Exodus, with throngs of black attendees reinforcing the message by singing “John Brown’s Body” to cap off the affair.

Outside the hall — really, across the country — the contrasting reality of American race relations couldn’t have been more stark. The year 1915 was the height of the Jim Crow era, a year when, in the American South, there were more than 50 lynchings of blacks alone, and in the White House, President Woodrow Wilson screened the painfully racist and repressive version of Civil War and Reconstruction history depicted in D.W. Griffith’s silent film, “Birth of a Nation.”

For 20 years, “separate but equal” had been enshrined in constitutional law, so that in nearly every sphere, African-Americans encountered segregation practices reinforcing their status as second-class citizens.

At the same time, blacks fleeing the South, while facing their share of discrimination in the North, gained a greater degree of social freedom and economic opportunity working in factories than ever before, and the 50th anniversary of emancipation in Chicago only anticipated what was to come in the 1920s with the ascendance of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance.

In the crowds passing through the great exhibition in Chicago was Woodson, future founder of Negro History Week. Born to former slave parents in 1875, Woodson attended high school in West Virginia and, after graduating from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, went on to become the second African-American, after W.E.B. Du Bois, to be awarded a doctorate in history from Harvard University (in 1912).

That didn’t mean Harvard had been a walk in the park, however, according to Jacqueline Goggin, author of “Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History.” There, Woodson confronted what had already been so evident in the South when his professor, Edward Channing, challenged Woodson to prove Negroes had a history worth studying. Ever after, black history became Woodson’s mission, and in Chicago 1915, he glimpsed what it could mean to reach thousands of black men and women with the truth.

Woodson was so moved by what he saw in the Windy City that later that year, he formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (the precursor to the ASALH) and launched the Journal of Negro History in 1916. Eventually, he taught in the history departments at Howard University and West Virginia State before returning to Washington to popularize black history full-time.

Woodson recognized firsthand the disconnect between what elite scholars like Du Bois were generating at the university level and what teachers and students were facing in the poorest of segregated schools. “[T]o handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching,” Woodson wrote in his 1933 classic, “The Mis-Education of the Negro.”

“It is strange, then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”

To turn the tide, Woodson first had to research the counter-narrative of black history. “We have a wonderful history behind us,” he encouraged readers in a Jan. 22, 1922, column in the Southern Workman. “It reads like the history of people in an heroic age.” The mission, as he saw it, was to “study this history, and study it with the understanding that we are not, after all, an inferior people, but simply a people who have been set back, a people whose progress has been impeded. We are going back to that beautiful history and it is going to inspire us to greater achievements.”

Aware that he couldn’t pull this off on his own, Woodson recruited a brilliant team of black historians to the association. They included other Harvard men Rayford Logan, Alrutheus Ambush Taylor and Charles Wesley. In his report on the association’s progress for the year 1922 to 1923, Woodson announced that his team was focusing specifically on the history of free blacks before the Civil War and on the story of the negro in Reconstruction. Woodson also had George Dow digging into 18th-century Colonial newspapers in New England while Irene Wright worked on the Fort Mose settlement in Spanish Florida. Woodson also reported progress on placing the Journal of Negro History into libraries and schools throughout the nation.

Yet, while the needle was moving, Woodson still was struggling to overcome the gap between what cutting-edge college and university research revealed and what was being taught in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. Not only did he have to find more creative ways to stimulate demand for the association’s research, he had to reverse what he perceived as an epidemic of inadequacy and low self-esteem among the rising generation.

On one hand, as recounted in a Chicago Defender editorial in 1923, “A Chicago school-teacher was instructing a class of foreign children in the history of the Civil War. One Italian youngster asked her: ‘What did the Negro do in that war? Didn’t he fight for himself?’ The teacher was abashed, scarcely able to account for this glaring omission in the records that the child had discovered.”

On the other hand, the children of black sharecroppers and factory workers had no way of knowing that the “greatest scholars of today are saying that there is no such thing as race in science and that there is nothing in anthropology or psychology to support such myths as the inferiority or superiority of races.”

The solution Woodson landed on was a public relations coup: to “make a way out of no way.” The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History chose the second week in February to inaugurate a celebration of black history, The Washington Post reported on Jan. 24, 1926. “The purpose of the celebration is to popularize the study of the history of the negro, and to obtain support for its promotion.”

In a Feb. 7, 1942, article in the Philadelphia Tribune, Woodson explained that February is a significant month in African-American history, adding: “We concentrate especially upon the second week of February because the most important events of concern to the Negro took place at that time.” They were, chiefly, the birthdays of the great triumvirate, Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12), George Washington (Feb. 22) and, in between, Frederick Douglass, who, not knowing his slave birthday, had taken Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. “All three were soldiers for freedom and believed that the Negroes should be liberated,” Woodson explained. In other words, he was interested in carving out a different kind of Mount Rushmore in American hearts and minds — one with white and black faces.

But in no way was Negro History Week meant to be limited to the great men of history, Woodson added; it also was to include lesser-known figures and events with February anniversaries — from Sen. Hiram Revels taking his oath of office at the Capitol in 1870 (Feb. 25) to the establishment of the Dominican Independence Day (Feb. 27) to the day in 1776 when George Washington sent a letter to the poet Phillis Wheatley acknowledging her “genius” (Feb. 28).

Reporting on the first-year rollout in the Journal of Negro History in April 1926, Woodson shared the following feedback: “A teacher said: ‘The celebration improved my children a hundred percent. I wish we could have Negro History Week throughout the year. Let the good work go on.’ “

“The good work” did “go on.” And, over the next two decades, Negro History Week caught on, thanks to the support Woodson received from black churches, clubs and civic organizations. By 1933, the Depression years, his association was reporting a slew of invitations they had received to speak at black and white schools as well as the creation of “wide awake courses dealing with every aspect of Negro history and life,” according to the New Journal and Guide on Dec. 23, 1933.

After World War II, Negro History Week created a venue for returning black servicemen and women to tell their stories. Not long after, according to the ASALH, African-Americans in West Virginia expanded the celebration to Negro History Month.

The next move in the evolution was from grassroots organizing to nationwide standardization. In 1948, a new “Negro History Kit,” prepared by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was designed for use in communities with few or no library facilities. As part of its rollout, a 32-page “Negro History Pamphlet” was offered at the low cost of $2 and included everything a teacher might need: six poems by Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson and Mavis B. Mixon; three orations by Frederic Douglass, Rep. Robert Brown Elliot and Booker T. Washington; a list of plays; a program for each of the five school days of Negro History Week; and 17 photos for display.

The problem was that, over time, it began to feel like Negro History Week was confined to a box without successfully advancing the goal of integrating the year-round curriculum. When Woodson died at the age of 74 in 1950, there was a leadership vacuum at the front of the cause before the civil rights movement itself had taken off. And by the time students like me came along in the late ’60s and ’70s, the fallout from the King assassination and the rise of the black power movement made Negro History Week feel like a relic of a second-class past — compartmentalized and co-opted.

According to the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 7, 1972, some “balk[ed]” at the term “Negro.” Others thought it was silly to include Lincoln’s birthday, when it didn’t always fall in same week as Douglass’ birthday. Among those interviewed, Mattie Evans of the Progressive Black Associates said black history was “too big for that. . . . This is not to discredit the idea, but time dictates that something different happen. We’ve moved to a point now where one week is not enough. We need to take the spotlight off the one week and put it on the year around.” Joe Conner, vice chairman of the Black Students Union at the University of Southern California, added, “Every day of our lives should be black and we shouldn’t have to emphasize it one day.”

In 1976, America’s bicentennial year, Negro History Week went national, with the word “Negro” changed to “Black” and the week stretched out to a month of activities, with full support from President Gerald Ford. But in the years that followed, hearing stories from the front lines of elementary, junior high and high schools only deepened skepticism among black historians. For a number of overworked teachers, we learned, Black History Month felt like another frustrating mandate handed down from on high. For appearances’ sake, they thought they could satisfy it with a Harriet Tubman essay or drawing contest here, a showing or two of “Roots” there, a flashy display board of “famous firsts” like George Washington Carver here and there, without giving serious thought to how those same faces had impacted the day-to-day curriculum they were teaching March through January. The designation of MLK Day as a federal holiday in 1986 only seemed to confuse the matter more.

Long before his death, Woodson had addressed this very concern in a 1933 New Journal and Guide article: “He who regards the celebration of Negro History Week as an effort to crowd into seven days intensive study all that should be learned by the Negro during the year is either uninformed as to what the celebration means or is too biased to tell the truth.”

The challenge, of course, was that “public authorities” in charge of school curricula around the country decided what was and wasn’t taught. As Woodson conceived it, Negro History Week was meant to stimulate greater awareness and, from it, a greater lobbying effort of those same public authorities. As he put it, “The chief aim of the celebration is so to exhibit the works of the Negroes and dramatize their achievements as to induce educational authorities to incorporate into the course of study the same sort of treatment of the Negro that we have of other elements of the American population.”

We may be “a nation within a nation,” as the 19th-century black abolitionist Martin Delaney declared, but, from slavery to freedom, our 500-year story is indivisible from that of the nation. And to leave it out on any given day (or to carve it out for “special” display on only 28 or 29 days in February) is to distort our common past while robbing those who will shape the future of an expansive archive of resiliency and hope.

However, until we achieve our goal of year-round integration of the American history curriculum in our schools, we should continue to leverage Black History Month to spotlight new research (and the scholars publishing that work, as we did in “Many Rivers to Cross”), and to measure our progress in fulfilling Woodson’s noble vision. A good start would be to ask each other the same questions Woodson put to his readers in the Pittsburgh Courier on Jan. 15, 1948.

During Negro History week, he wrote, perhaps thinking back to the great emancipation anniversary in Chicago in 1915, “every Negro should ask the question as to whether his race is better off today than it was in 1865? We are free now we contend; but what is freedom?”

Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor-in-chief of The Root, is a professor and founding director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He wrote and hosts the series, “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” covering the 500-year sweep of African-American history from the age of exploration to the presidency of Barack Obama, which aired on PBS last year.